Episode 364

26:09Both of them were to be redone completely, okay? Corey did have credentials, and he had worked at Sue's house before. The whole reason she'd hired him was because he was a subcontractor on her kitchen remodel. She already knew him. Sue may have been strong-willed, but she was a trusting and fair woman. Even though her friends all warned her something wasn't right, something was a little, you know, off about this guy, she wanted to give Corey a chance to finish what he started. So then he came in one day, every time he's supposed to show up on, oh, sorry, every time he's supposed to show up on Monday, he always text her back and forth they text he'd always text her with a new excuse so he never really could show up but one day just a few weeks back he shows up and he goes in her house and he tells her how good she looks that day okay and how old are you Sue and she said I'm 65 just turned 65 we're going to turn 65 and he said man you look good are you widowed?

27:24And she said, yes, I am. And he said, well, he said, man, you're looking good. He said, I was wondering, could I get a loan? She said, a loan? Corey, you got 12 grand of my money. I have no money to give you. You've done nothing for me. Now, this is her story to me. That was the final straw. Sue firmly told Corey no. She had already given him more than half of the cost of the entire job up front, and he wasn't getting another penny. No, oh, he just told her, I'll go to the bank and get a loan. That was his attitude after he kind of turned the other direction and left her, okay? So that's what happened at that point.

28:05So then she told me that week, sometime during that week, I feel I'm real uncomfortable with him now. I said, Sue, I told you I think there's an issue here. The police now knew that Corey had lied to them about the money. They were able to track all of this with Sue's bank account and checkbook. So they returned to Corey asking him if they could look into his storage unit, where he kept most of his construction supplies. He opened up the door and the police let their canine dog roam the small, stuffy space. The dog popped his nose in and out of every shelf, every box, every random paint can. Then, when he got close to Corey's tool bag, the one he had with him at Sue's house, the dog started barking, freaking out, alerting them of decomposition.

29:03But the cops didn't tell Corey this. They thanked him and they left. a few days later they showed up at his house with a warrant for his truck here's the deal obviously i talked to you before about this whole thing and we've been following up because we still haven't found her okay susan so we don't know where she's at so you're checking boxes checking boxes that's what i'm doing going through making sure what can i do to what do you need so what we need is your truck because your truck was the last one at the house okay as far as you need to Take it? Yeah. I don't know. They want to take my truck.

29:42Well, here, let me finish. Okay. Let me finish talking. Okay. All right. Let me get the keys. It's okay. We're going to take a truck. I have a cell phone for it. So it's coming with us. All right. I'm just trying to let you know what we're doing. Okay. That's fine. Corey played it cool. He said he had nothing to hide, and his wife repeated that from behind him. I know you're in construction. You do all sorts of construction stuff. Got all sorts of nicks and scratches all over you. I noticed the other day when I talked to you, you had one on the inside of your arm that looked pretty fresh right here, above your tattoo right here.

30:15What's that from? I do demo work. It's from all kinds of stuff. Would you be okay if I took a picture of it real quick? Yeah. Okay. That would be awesome. You got a... Cassie, then I'm going to take pictures of my arms now. Can I take my brain with me so she can have a picture of it? Hey, are you okay with me taking a picture of your arm? You know what? Do you have to ask your wife? No, I mean, that doesn't upset me. You can do that. That's fine. Yeah, take all the pictures. Take a picture of him first, sir, so we know whose arm it is. On the front lawn of his suburban neighborhood, more cops began showing up with their paperwork, cameras, and a police tow truck.

30:54Corey was slowly becoming the neighborhood's spectacle, and his easygoing persona started to crack. All right, well, while we're at it, so we can eliminate it, and then maybe I don't have to talk to you again after this in any way, shape, or form? Since you look like you want to cooperate and I want to believe everything Okay, mind if we take a DNA sample and eliminate you because you have been in the house that way we can wipe that Yeah, you're okay with that. Sure. All right, cool So what I'm gonna do is get a tow truck to come over here because I don't want to drive your truck I would prefer if you drove it But now that all my neighbors have seen this I guess it really doesn't and then I'm gonna get a CST to come over Just do a quick swab.

31:28That'll be an elimination one and then that'll probably be the end of it I'll get your truck back to you and then we'll be done with it My DNA fingerprints, everything's already in the system. Okay, perfect. Can you get your keys for me, Sam? Sure. Corey kept repeating that his prints were in the system, as if he was trying to say the thing the cops already knew out loud so that he wouldn't be caught lying. Because even though Corey Binderham had been a decent citizen for most of his adult life, there was something that happened decades ago that he could never escape. Something that haunted him.

32:05Something that informed others about his character. His true character. It haunted his marriage. It really affected his life in a way that even those close to him didn't realize. Now the police knew about it too. You see, when Corey Binderham was just 17, he stepped into something he should never have. The court records say he and a friend met three AWOL Army Ranger trainees at a hotel, setting up a gun deal. Corey wasn't the supplier, he was the middleman. His job was simple. Pick them up, drive them deep into a remote Florida swamp, and lead them to a stash of weapons. They did exactly that.

32:55A quiet pickup, no small talk. Then a long drive into the dark. The soldiers were ready, dressed in wetsuits, wading into the murky water to retrieve the package. But halfway across, everything flipped. Corey opened fire. Bullets tore through the swamp as soldiers tried to escape, trapped and exposed. One managed to run and kept going until he reached a house and got help. Corey and his friend disappeared into the night. Two soldiers nearly died. The only reason they didn't was because the third managed to get help. It was clear that Corey had intended to murder all three of these men, whilst pocketing the money for the whole shindig.

33:43It didn't take long to find Corey. Young, reckless, and now facing real adult charges, he was sentenced to seven years in prison and ten years probation for aggravated battery with a firearm. Now, standing in his front lawn, a father, a husband, a business owner, Corey's past was staring him in the face as police prepared to take his work truck into evidence. Corey reassured the cops he was an innocent man. But what else would a murderer claim? Well, I certainly hope so. It was 27 years ago. I certainly... I was 17. Listen, Corey, I certainly hope so. I really do. and and if it is i assure you i promise i'll be the first one to come back and shake your hand i certainly hope you're gonna go door to door and say look i was wrong i embarrassed this man 100 i will do that cory didn't look scared he looked furious his wife angry and being escorted to a police station his daughter just home from college watching it all unfold and now the neighbors were watching too.

34:52That's what he felt most. Humiliation.

35:20and mowing the lawn across the street. She shook my hand in the doorway. And she clearly did not want to talk to you anymore. She was done with you. I know. She had an extensive, extensive, meticulous, detailed list of things and why she did not want to talk to you and why she was done with you. I didn't know that.

35:48I didn't know that. Corey thought the tension between him and this seemingly family-less widow would stay just that between the two of them. He didn't count on her having a circle of retired, watchful, fiercely protective friends, tracking every detail, and being uber-curious about her remodel. Her best friend, the one who handed over the diary, told police everything she knew. Old lady gossip was now becoming evidence. Then she was beating herself up for giving him that and that. She said, well, I'm going to get my money back. I've been talking to Lynn, to the lady next door's daughter, Lynn, and she's going to help me get an attorney and I'm going to get the police and them involved.

36:32And I'm going to see if I can get my 12 grand back because he's done anything. You think I should pay him a little something for ripping out the bathroom what he's done? I said, give him nothing. The man's cost you nothing but grief, Sue. Sue had found help getting a lawyer and was making plans to get the authorities involved. Still, she wanted to do this the right way, without lawyers. She gave Corey one last chance, and he promised he would bring her her money back. So he shows up with a business check, okay? She told me, he said, here, she said, I'm not taking that business check. You've been lying to me.

37:10I will accept nothing more than a cashier's check. He told her at that point, I really don't have that$12 ,000, but I'm going to have from now till next week to get it because I'm returning the bathtub and the shower stuff he bought. Sue said to me, he said he's returning the bathtub, and I said to him, it's only$900, Corey. We're talking$12 ,000. When Sue refused the business check, Corey admitted he didn't have the funds in his account to pay her in full. But he'd return some supplies and he'd get her the money, he said. He was desperate to get this woman off his back. The next Wednesday morning, which is the 23rd that I went to her house, I said to her, she was supposed to show up that day.

37:56She had told me over the phone, you know, hey, he's coming Wednesday morning between 8 and 8.30. I said, well, Sue, is he going to have your cashier's check? Yes, he is, because he knows better. I said, okay. So when I got there at 1230 that day, when I get there for our lunching, I said, Sue, did Jack Rabbit show up today? She said, no, but he called me. She said, and I told him, what's your excuse or whatever? He said, Sue, I'm going to be there with your 12 grand. I'm going to bring it in a cashier's check or whatever. I need till tonight between 6 and 630 to get it there to you. I'm in St.

38:33Augustine Court. something to do with his divorce. But Corey wasn't getting divorced. He was piling lies upon lies to everyone in his life. And the facade was cracking. To Sue, he had one set of excuses for his inadequacies and to his wife, another. He was burning the candle at both ends. Juggling jobs, staying up all night drinking at the bar. passing off one debt to cover another. A contractor Ponzi scheme happens more often than you think. He was drowning in a circus act and at the center of it all, the problem he couldn't solve was a stubborn 65-year-old widow who was now putting her foot down and putting it down hard.

39:28So like I said, you know you lied to me, right? When we talked on Tuesday. About what? You said all you owed her was$1 ,294.54. And that's the carbon check that you showed me dated for$10.24. That's the check that I wrote her to reimburse. You owed her$12 ,000. And I have all the checks that she wrote out to you. There's three of them. There's three of them. Along with her meticulous detailed list of the money that she gave me. Right. Why would you lie about that? Corey had no idea that the police detected human decomposition in his storage unit. They kept that card close to their chest. They had also secured security footage from Home Depot showing Corey buying numerous bags of concrete after he was at Sue's place.

40:15You truly protest in your innocence and truly go on trying to, you know, comply and go a long way to show that you didn't have anything to do with it. But I'm just telling you, without throwing all this stuff in here, there is a lot that says you do know more than what you're telling not necessarily that you did anything to her but you know more than what you're telling me i can tell you what else i'm confident i have nothing to do with her being missing oh that that's that's what i am very confident in yeah i certainly hope so i really do detectives didn't have enough on cory to arrest him right then and there.

40:52So they took his truck, shook his hand, and left him to sweat it out alone on his front lawn. That's when police got in touch with Leanne. They took her down to the station and started asking her about Corey, but she had zero clue what was going on. They didn't even tell me really why I was there. They just kept asking me like all these questions. Like, how long have you known him? What were you doing on this day? What was he doing on this day? And like, okay, where are be going with this? Like, what's going on? It literally took like hours into this for me to figure out what they were actually looking for.

41:26And then at that point, I'm like, no, not possible. Like, there's no way. That's not possible. From the outside, Corey was not suspicious. He was a loving father, a businessman, the fun guy who would foot the bill for beers and treat his employees like gold. But something dark had entered Corey's life again, and only Leanne was privy to it. Corey had started doing cocaine. When he first started using, like that house party he went to, you know, he was doing cocaine. It was more of like a party thing. Like, I want to be up all night. I'm not really good at bed. It wasn't like an every day I have to have it thing.

42:06It was, I'm going to go party the night away and then go to work tomorrow and do my normal job. and it was like every once in a while, probably once a week, twice a week. It wasn't an everyday thing for him. But like all addictions, it did progress. Corey may have been able to manage his business, his family, his wife, who he kept disappointing, and his late night partying with friends. But once cocaine entered the picture, things became a lot less manageable. And what Leanne didn't know was that Corey had been to rehab for cocaine addiction before. Years back, he had snorted away his family's finances.

42:44His wife found out, sent him to rehab, and he promised to never touch the stuff again. They were still building back the trust that had been lost all those years ago, when Corey started partying again in secret. But it did progress. It progressed heavily. And then I did see a difference in him. Like, he would get irritated faster. You could kind of see it in his face that he was really tired. He was just really drained. He had a very short temper, not with me and not with anybody else that I saw, but just like when we're working, if he dropped something, he'd be cussing like, oh my gosh, damn it.

43:20Where before I don't feel like he'd drop something, he'd laugh it off and keep going. Leanne says Corey was not an angry man. She only saw him explode one time when they were out drinking and a miscommunication left him stranded at a house party with strangers. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be around someone that shows real emotion, whether good or bad, all of the time, than someone who holds it all in, bottles it all up, and it's all just optics. Until one day, they explode. He's screaming in the phone, you need to fucking come get me right fucking, like just screaming. And me and my sister and everybody, because we all rode together, we're like, what is going on?

44:04he's going off like off the rails so he's saying something about these girls invited him over and then a whole bunch of dudes showed up I don't I don't know what happened at that house party he wasn't there very long but he ended up calling his wife because the next day he told me he called his wife and his wife picked him up then you know you kind of think like was there just alcohol involved with the guys maybe rude to him and hurt his feelings because he was very soft-hearted so it was like maybe somebody just hurt his feelings he took things very personal and I think that's why he made sure to stay in shape and things like that.

44:36Maybe he felt bullied a lot. So you could tell that was just his demeanor. He needed to feel like he was included in places. It was hard for Leanne to grasp that Corey could have murdered someone. I mean, think about it. Imagine someone you know, someone that you're close to. Now imagine that they killed someone. Like for real. How do you reconcile that? But as the hours ticked by and police slowly revealed more information to her, Leanne realized that maybe her sweet, chill buddy, Corey, could have something to do with this. Though she'd only seen that one outburst, she had seen it. The genie was out of the bottle.

45:18She knew he was using drugs and something had changed in him. The day that Leanne called in sick because of her torn rotator cuff was the day that Sue went missing. The next day on the job, Corey was distant, strange, and completely detached. Leanne remembered that day because she'd never seen Corey like that. It was all starting to click together, and she didn't like that feeling. They kept saying all this stuff, but when they told me about the glass and things like that, and how they had pinged his phone the day of there, and I knew that was the day I was off work, I started thinking, wait a minute.

45:58Aside from the bus footage and the smell of decomposition detected in Corey's storage unit, detectives uncovered two things far more deliberate. One was some shards of glass in Sue's driveway, and they needed Leanne to confirm where this glass came from. Then, I guess, the guy's house we were working on at that time, we were working on a few people's houses, But this one guy in particular, when we took the glass door out of the shower down to the truck, it slipped out my hand and it shattered. It shattered everywhere, like in a million pieces. And supposedly that was one of the things they said is they found that glass in her driveway.

46:37And they had asked me, did we do anything glass? And I was like, oh, yeah, we had a door break, but we cleaned it up. But I guess that's what got left in her driveway the day that he was late picking me up. Secondly, the detectives had surveillance from Home Depot showing Corey there the very morning he went to Sue's house buying bags of concrete. Not tools, not tons of materials for a visible build, just concrete and a few random items that looked like a clear cover-up. He told police it was for a job, but Leanne knew his jobs, his materials, his patterns, and this wasn't part of that. There was no project that called for concrete.

47:20So detectives had Leanne call Corey on a recorded line and ask him about the concrete, casually. Like it didn't matter. But by then, it mattered more than anything else, because they still had no body. Hey. Hey. Hey. They're gone. They're gone. Okay. See, I wasn't, I suppose it wasn't that bad. It was exhausting. It was exhausting. You did not kill that woman, did you? No, not no. I'm going to start calling you murderer of bedroom. No, don't do that. Put that on the phone. I'm going to play. I highly doubt that. They even asked me, they wanted to know exactly what materials we were using on the job site.

48:10And they kept asking me over and over about concrete. So I asked him, I said, what is this about you buying concrete? And he said, yeah, I bought concrete. I said, what'd you buy concrete for? He said, remember, we're building a step at that last customer. We were at a different customer. And I said, Corey, no, we're not. I said, we've never used concrete. What are you talking about? He's like, you don't remember the step we're building? I'm like, no. And then he turned and he's like, oh, I forgot. you weren't there that day that they requested that to be done and i was like oh yeah because i've never we've never bought concrete we've never dealt with concrete so i don't know none about no concrete yeah what do they think i dropped her in a fucking river are you serious i don't know but i bet that's why they're asking and i they must think that i knew about the concrete because they literally kept asking me and then they would look at me funny when i would say no we don't use concrete they just kept looking at me funny they know i also are um and buy four bags of Leveller and Will of Walters.

49:16I bought all kinds of stuff. That's why they kept asking. That's why they asked you about the concrete I've had. And you should see nothing like that. I've been nowhere near the river. I've been nowhere near the river. But at that point, I'm getting a little terrified. Like, why are you pushing this so hard? Wait a minute. Then it started kind of hitting me. Like, why are you lying? If you're lying, there's a reason you're lying why you lie. Before the police were done with Leanne, she divulged one thing that made them stop dead in their tracks. It was a thing that would change the entire course of their chase with Jack Rabbit.

49:52I mean, Corey. She told them that one time, they were at the dump, getting rid of construction materials, and Corey joked that the dump would be a perfect place to hide a body. What a strange thing to say. The light bulb went off. The detectives had access to Life360 Data, which is an app that Corey's wife made him keep on his phone so she could keep track of where he was at all times. It was a deal they had struck after he got out of rehab and promised to change his ways. So Corey had the app on all morning, the day Sue went missing, except for one hour after she disappeared. That is when he went to the Rosemary Landfill.

50:40And detectives knew what they had to do. But then the unthinkable happened. Corey skipped town. But not before cashing a check he had secretly stolen from another client about a week prior. Like I said, contractor Ponzi scheme. It happens all the time and it happened to me. A contractor named Justin Jones promised to do some work for me. He took 17 grand and disappeared. I had to sue him. And when I did, I found out he owed over a million dollars to various other victims. At the end of the day, I was just out 17 grand. Because even though I did sue him and won, he had no assets of any kind under his name.

51:29No credit. No nothing. What a piece of shit. Anyway, watch out for these contractors. They can really take you for a ride and never turn your back on them. The guy's house that we were working on, where I tore my arm using the jackhammer, one of the days we were there, I guess the last day we were there after all this happened, he went in that man's office and stole a check out of his checkbook, and that was his money to get him out of town. When he went on the run, that's how they called him. he was in the bank cashing that check he wrote to himself, and he hauled ass with that. That's how he was getting out of town.

52:11Corey had been playing it cool with the cops, his employees, his family, but inside he was panicking. The detectives were trying to hunt Corey down. His wife and children were helping, giving the cops tips every time Corey called them to check in from another random burner phone. Footage from the Rosemary landfill showed Corey showing up that morning. He took in a load that was about 300 pounds and dumped it. When the cashier weighed his truck on the way out for the dump, he'd shed all that weight. But when he spoke to Leanne, he told her he had 120 pounds of concrete to dispose of. So when they looked at the amount of concrete he bought and the weight of her body and added them together, that's exactly what he took to the dump.

53:01The exact amount that went into the dump because they weigh it when you go in. But finding Sue in a landfill wouldn't be so simple. The construction rubbish had been transported to a new site in Georgia called the Chesser Island Road Landfill, about an hour away. When the detectives spoke with someone at the landfill, they said that the dump load was fresh. Nothing else had been put on top of it. If Sue's body came from the Rosemary Landfill, she'd be in that pile. So over the next week, in tandem with the FBI, 90 employees searched an area of the landfill about the size of a baseball field. They turned over every piece of trash desperately trying to find any trace of Sue.

53:47Individuals in white hazmat suits poked and prodded at every little piece of garbage, while excavators ripped through the mess. The media was there, capturing each painful, hopeless second. of what was akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. Then, on the ninth day, after sifting through 7 ,300 tons of waste, someone found a piece of what appeared to be a human jaw. Then, more pieces emerged in the rubble, all tangled up in a shredded concrete bag. Amongst them were women's clothing, two fingernails, and a tarp. Dental records soon confirmed it was, in fact, Sue Malden. The serial number on the concrete bags was intact, and it was an exact match to the receipt of Corey's purchases.

54:47The police got in touch with the client who Corey said he bought the concrete for, and she knew nothing about a concrete step being built in her home. So the detective asked me about that, and I told him that there was nothing here that required any concrete work. The client also confirmed that Corey never finished the job he began at her place, giving her similar excuses like he had to sue. He had to go to Mayo Clinic, and he had to go to the doctor for this, or something. There was always an excuse, and then at the end, he just vanished, and my work was never completed. It had been almost four months since Sue's friends at the British club had reported her missing, and now finally they had her body.

55:35Corey had accused the police of tunnel vision from the jump. But they were right all along. They soon captured Corey. His attempts to run were futile, especially since he tried to cash the check he stole and wrote to himself. Now Corey would have to face the police again. but not from his front lawn as a free man. He would be in handcuffs at the station, and there was evidence that he could not refute. Mr. Too Cool Cory Binderham had painted himself into a corner that he would never escape.

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56:52Local contractor Corey Benderham seemed like your typical dad next door. But underneath his friendly, chill exterior was a former criminal, relapsing cocaine addict and shoddy businessman whose life was crumbling beneath him. At the center of all of his problems was a 65-year-old widow named Sue Malden, who refused to let Corey off the hook for the$12 ,000 he owed her in bathroom remodeling work. Corey had been accused from the very beginning, but with no body and no witnesses, the detectives had little to work on but gut feelings and circumstantial evidence. As things heated up, Corey skipped town with a stolen check.

57:36Meanwhile, a massive investigation team combed the landfill and discovered Chu's body and other evidence proving Corey was the killer. All of Corey's confident defenses fell. And on January 31st, 2020, Corey was brought into the station in handcuffs after being arrested for cashing that stolen check. Mr. Benner? How you doing? I'm all right. I'm going to ask you this thing, but I'm sure it's not pleasant. I wanted to come in touch base with you. Told you I'd give you an update when we got one. Sure. So we got one. And cut right to the chase. When we talked about before, you indicated that I had tunnel vision.

58:26I didn't have tunnel vision. We know what you did. We located Susan. We're bringing her home. And you're going to be charged with murder. Intemperate evidence to begin with. I know that's a lot to hit you in one second, but obviously you've known this whole time. You've just kind of been waiting on it, I'm sure. Not at all. No? Mm-mm. I did reach out to Cassidy, give her heads up, because I know, obviously, your daughters, you know, I don't want them to get bombarded with stuff that they don't need to. Mm-hmm. Okay? I did that for Cassidy, not for you. Sure. All right? and I'm sure you're familiar with this process how it goes from here yeah I'm going to tell you I'm not going to say anything you'll get upset again no I'm not hey we won we got our body you're being charged I'm not upset it's very unfortunate that

59:19I didn't have anything to do with it well we can prove otherwise I get that and you can maintain that all you want I understand that I'm just here to tell you that I don't need you to say anything at all, ever, because the evidence is there. The physical evidence is there. The whole thing is laid out. And just so there's no misunderstanding, you do realize we found Susan Mullen. We positively identified her. We found her in the Chessaro Landfill. Okay. So you understand? Yeah, I understand. Okay. Corey sat in his orange jumpsuit, lips pressed thin. He'd been here before, but that was when he was 17, when recklessness could pass for ignorance and excuses came easy.

1:00:06Now he was a grown-ass man, a husband, a father, someone who had been given a second chance and burned straight through it. Whatever he once hid behind was gone. What remained was simple and brutal. A grown-ass man who murdered a defenseless widow. Someone so physically frail, she needed help starting a lawnmower. There was no chaos, no confusion, no youth to blame. Just his own selfish choice. And it was pathetic. What my mind goes to is I want to know why. Why? I'm not asking you to tell me anything. Obviously, you already invoked, but that's the real reason for me. That's what keeps me up at night.

1:00:55I just want to know why. So maybe at some point down the road, we can have a conversation and just find out why. Because at this point, we're past if you did it. That's a lock. What is important now is why. Corey wasn't going to answer that question. The detective knew it from the moment he asked it. But it had to be said out loud because this question hung over the case over every interview, every piece of evidence. It settled into the lives Sue left behind while it seeped into Corey's own home, into his wife and daughters, into his co-workers forced to carry the weight of what he'd done. The why haunting Leanne.

1:01:43I guess he tried to be calm with her, like, hey, okay, just give me a chance to fix this. And she blatantly said, you know, I'm going to call the police department. And I don't know if that triggered something in him where he'd already been to prison. Instead of going, okay, I'm just going to get us, you know, have to pay the money back. I think his mind went to, I'm going to go back to jail. So then they, she pretty much, he kept trying to talk to her and say, hey, just can you work with me? Can you help me? You know, we'll work this out. She was very adamant about, no, I've had enough. I've tried for months.

1:02:11I want my money. I want my money now or I'm calling the cops. And then supposedly he had his tool bag in the house. Now, mind you, I was not there. This is just what I took from it.

1:02:23And she had blunt force trauma to the back of her head. And he, you know, always has hammers in his bag. And that's where that came from, is what I gathered, is that he struck her in the back of the head with one of the tools. and I almost feel like, you know, I could see him now just pacing around like, how do I figure this out? And it's just sad that, you know, she wasn't really aware of her surrounding at that point to say, let me keep him in my vision because somehow he got behind her. I don't know if she was sitting on the couch or what, but she didn't keep him in her eyesight for him to hit her in the back of the head like that.

1:03:00An autopsy later revealed that Corey had struck Sue in the back of the head. Then he strangled her until she died. Detectives theorize that Corey then cleaned up the house as best he could, apparently doing more work than the remodel would have taken. He grabbed the tool bag that Sue had been holding hostage and took her body to his storage unit. But they never said anything about chopping things up. They just said that he put her in this Rubbermaid thing, put it in concrete, went to the dump, dropped it at the dump. As Corey's arrest and arraignment spread through the local news, Leanne grappled with what had happened that day in October.

1:03:43Her torn rotator cuff, Corey's strange behavior in the truck, the stolen check. It had all happened within her presence and she had no clue. So it was terrifying for me that I was sitting right in the truck with a man who just killed a lady and I'm sitting in that same truck right after he dumps her body at the dump. I get in that same vehicle. Oh, and then in the vehicle, there was a gold ring in the door and I asked him about it. I said, whose is this? And he said it was one of the girls, one of his daughters. But the police department told me that he said it was mine and I don't even wear jewelry.

1:04:24When I do, it's not gold. So I was like, that is not my ring. They showed it to me and I guess that was supposedly her ring. So it's really creepy. You know, I'm sitting in this car. A dead lady's ring is right next to me. And it doesn't, it's surreal. Like, it doesn't feel real. It feels like this is a movie. This is not actually happening. Leanne thinks that Corey lived under the crushing weight of his own lives, especially when it came to the lack of trust with his wife. But I think he was almost like the kid in the relationship. Like, he felt like he had to really prove that he was good to her or he had to prove that he was worthy.

1:04:58Like, he always had this mentality, like, I don't want her upset with me and I don't want to think I did something wrong. Kind of like, you know, your children do. They always want their parents to be proud of them. So I think he was so terrified that she was going to find out that he screwed up again. That I think between that and then going back to jail, I think he lost it. Corey would continue to protest his innocence. As the prosecution prepared for trial, many more things were revealed about Corey's crumbling life. His drug addiction had escalated from cocaine to Percocet and steroids. Corey didn't even have enough money in his business account to cover the check he had written to Sue for$1 ,294.

1:05:40He had purchased the concrete an hour before he went to Sue's. This was all planned. He knew he was going to kill her that day, disguise her in concrete and toss her into a dump. and he thought he was slick enough to get away with it. That's the perplexing thing about Corey. It was like he assumed the cops would give up on Sue because she was just an old, single lady with no family and no one to really care if she was gone. Her life, you know, didn't matter enough to dig into. At least that's what he thought. It took almost five years for the trial to officially begin. between the court closures of COVID, that absurd fiasco, the complicated evidence, and the fact that Corey was facing the death penalty.

1:06:33This was a standard time lapse. But to Sue's friends, it was an eternity. Leanne was also going to testify. And she said it wasn't by choice. They pretty much threatened me that I was going to jail if I did not go in there. Like, They did not give me an option. They were not very nice to me at all. Leanne skipped the first day of court. She just couldn't do it. But she showed up the next day, ready to give her testimony and terrified to see her old friend. Corey looked different. His skin was pale. He'd gained about 30 pounds. He looked awful, like someone had sucked the color out of him and then blown him up like a big fleshy beige balloon.

1:07:20Gross. I definitely had mixed emotions because part of me is like, you know, part of me still wants you to be the good person. Part of me wants to say he really didn't do it. But the other part of me has to go, come on, there's the evidence. He did it. So it was hard because, you know, they make you point at them to say, are they in the room? And you got to look at them, you know. And when I looked at him, I still saw the Corey I knew. I still saw that nice guy that was my buddy. I didn't see this monster that came out that day. I just saw poor Corey sitting there feeling like a little kid who's in trouble again.

1:07:57And I mean, it was just sad. I mean, I hate it. And I just, I know he did it and he deserves everything he gets for it. Everything. But it was just hard when you look at someone. And I think I understand now why moms who have sons and stuff that do this, why they kind of have that mixed emotion. Because you see that person for who you knew them to be. You don't see them for what they're being, what they really are. So I didn't. I answered the questions and I hot-tailed it right out of there as fast as I could. To the public, Corey was a disgusting monster who murdered an elderly woman for$12 ,000.

1:08:32But Leanne saw someone else. She saw a situation she could have helped prevent. I feel terrible for her that this happened. And I also feel terrible like that he as an adult could not control his own emotions. Like, why did you do that? Why could you not just say, okay, that's fine. Do what you want to do. And I'll walk out and I'll figure it out tomorrow. Like, I feel bad that he didn't feel like he had another option. Like, why did you make such a poor choice? It just, you're an adult. You have to know there's consequences. Why did you make? and I guess I feel bad because I didn't really see it coming either.

1:09:09So maybe part of that is me going, I wish I would have known he had so many issues, like money and things like that, because then maybe we all could have got together as friends and helped each other out. But, you know, he didn't say anything. So it kind of feels like, you know, you're just out hanging out with all these people and you don't even know what's going on in their life. Imagine hearing this whole story and thinking, I should have lent him money. Corey's trial was a slam dunk for the prosecution. He was given life in prison. and not death. He was spared death by only one bleeding heart vote.

1:09:41Some juror who had somehow gotten the whole morality thing upside down. Or maybe they just didn't want to deal with it personally. But apparently the jurors in general felt bad not for him, but for his two adult daughters who wrote in a desperate plea to the court to spare their father's life. The defense clung on to the fact that there was another piece of male DNA found on one of the fingernails at the dump and blamed Corey's diagnosed CTE for his impulse control. There's always some kind of condition or psychological trauma that they blame and pretend like it's an excuse. In the end, it was all fruitless.

1:10:27Corey's tricks and schemes throughout the entire five months of the investigation were so obvious and despicable, he had put his own life above Sue's, plain and simple. He convinced himself her life was expendable, just another cost of untangling the mess he'd made of his own. Corey was taken away in handcuffs. Sue's friends rejoiced. But everyone who knew and loved Corey was nauseous and broken. Because Corey did have a lot of people in his life who adored him, Leanne included. Even now, she's barely able to break through the facade to accept the fact that her buddy is a convicted killer. Well, and I think too, when people do something that bad, you don't see it in them.

1:11:21So, I mean, when I look at him, I see Corey. I don't see like when, you know, when I look at Ted Bundy, because that's all I know about him, I see, you know, the monster. But I didn't know him. And I guess when you know them, you don't see that monster unless that's all you know. It's hard to say if Corey was truly a monster. He raised two successful, loving children. He ran a business. He had friends and family who loved him. But when the cocaine crept back into his life, everything started to come apart. Like a truck losing its wheels at full speed. The balance he'd maintained for years wasn't effortless anymore.

1:11:59It collapsed. Suddenly and violently. And the truth is, the capacity had always been there. Just below the surface. As a kid, he did a very bad thing and served seven years for it. Not nearly enough time. Somewhere inside him was the instinct to put his needs above everyone else, and that never went away. That flash of darkness that led him to do something evil, bury it, and keep going like nothing ever happened. When pressure hit, he didn't stand up and face it, like a real man. It's hard not to see him as a boy who never fully became a man. A man takes responsibility. A man makes amends. A man faces his problems dead on.

1:12:53Addiction, money, whatever the fuck it might be. Especially when he has a family. Corey chose what felt good in the moment, and he was willing to destroy the people around him for it. Sue Malden was an innocent widow, a sweet old lady, who just wanted her bathroom remodeled. Instead, she was killed and discarded in a landfill by this fuck. But, thanks to you, the audience, listening to her story, she is not forgotten. And her memory lives on through her friends, especially the British club, and everyone else in her life who loved her. and her case, as dark as it is, made history. The first successful FBI-assisted landfill excavation to recover human remains in a murder investigation.

1:13:53It's a brutal ending. An unsatisfying one, if you ask me. But it is one that will always be remembered.

1:14:36I'll see you next time. like that, we have lots more at swordandscale.com. We have hundreds of hours of plus episodes that have never been released publicly. And our visual series, which is pretty beautiful and amazing. And there's 30 episodes available. So go check it out. See you next week. Stay safe.

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1:15:59The прис Jacqueline

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